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Finie is a conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI）tool that fully understands natural human languages and provides instant responses on users' finances. I have been the lead product designer/front-end engineer for Finie for the last one and a half years at Clinc Inc. Finie is deployed in Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Facebook Messenger, and also as a mobile app and a web app in the United States, Canada, Singapore, Turkey and United Kingdom. While designing conversational AI across multiple platforms, I dived deep into all aspects of highly advanced AI technologies and making them delightful for everyday living.

Finie was first launched on September 9, 2016 at Finovate, where we won ‘Best Of Show’.

Converse with
Financial AI That
Actually Understands Your Customers

The Opportunity - Conversational AI

Although Chatbots are becoming pervasive across industries, they also bring frustration to users when they fail to understand how people normally speak.

However, by implementing the most advanced AI research, Finie makes it possible for people to have unbounded and unconstrained conversations with AI.

While providing a great opportunity to create, invent, and define people's interactions with real conversational AI, Finie helps people achieve the tangible goal of understanding and gaining insights on their personal finances.

The Challenge

Conversational AI is such a new product that people don't know what they should expect.

Communicate the value of design in an engineering-driven environment and push design forwards.

Build and design products for the purpose of demo-to-production product life cycle.

Product Life Cycle 1: Introduction

Building the most advanced conversational AI

When I first joined the team in July 2016, I was the second full-time employee and the first designer. We had just finished the first round of funding and there was no actual product. However, we had eight ambitious people who believed we would build conversational AI to improve people's everyday living.

At the time the goal was to make a public release on Sep 9th, 2016 at Finovate NYC. Unfortunately it was still unclear who would be the target users and what problems we were solving. We simply tried to build things fast and if we failed, to fail fast. We had less than 2 months to build the demo product and make sure it actually worked. Thus I optimized the user research and design for a funtional demo, conducting 15 surveys, 7 interviews, and 3 rounds of usability testing.

How do people want to interact with conversational AI?

"What I really liked is that it seemed to understand what I was saying even though I wasn’t as clear. You can talk to [Finie] and it can spit it back to you so you could do it in the car, or walking around carrying groceries."

"I think it is very convenient that it can itemize my income and expenditures very quickly, and it's easy to use... Having your banking status in an audio form, that’s big for people. And [The interaction] was very clean and concise."

"I would imagine myself doing this more at home that’s where I would tend to check my finances and get a quick check. I like the idea of being able to speak because I could just ask questions quickly.""

Nancy
Mom @ Home

I collected data from four iterations of user research including participatory design and a diary study. The research revealed that there is a huge gap between what advanced AI technology can provide and what people expect when interacting with it. I like to make the analogy that AI is like the Wild West, full of opportunities to learn and improve.

Although conversational AI research has been around for over 30 years (source: wiki), the market wasn't ready until recent years. Diving deeper into our user studies, people share common interests that can translate into design features.

First public release - See it live

Expand the demo across multiple platforms to appeal to potential clients

After we successfully launched Finie on Sep 2016, we gained a wide range of attention from potential clients and investors. People wanted Finie to be built in Alexa, Google Home, Web, Mobile, IVR, and Facebook Messegner. As a design team of one, for demo purposes, I started to design a mobile mobile software of what Finie would be like in iOS, and worked side-by-side with an awesome client application developer, Cody Cannon.

What We Learned - B2B vs B2CSometimes it takes a lot of time and effort to understand which direction to go with your work. In the beginning, Cody and I spent four weeks making the mobile app into a perfect consumer-centered tool that would allow users to interact with personal finance through voice commands but also through visual dashboards - a potential Mint App combined with Siri. However, we failed in this project because we didn't communicate our design goals clearly with the CEO, who wanted a fancy and impressive mobile app that focused on displaying Finie's impressive voice capabilities to potential clients, instead of a well-rounded B2C app with visual tools.

wireframe

iteration

early stage prototype

Design Challenges - Design Process in a StartupWe sat down with the CEO and co-founders to refine what the success of the product would look like, and how to plan user studies and keep tracking of user data. Since we had a prototype at hand, it was easier to visualize and understand what founders thought clients wanted. However, the design process was nothing like what I learned at school, and I had to learn how to utilize different design approaches under constraints and communicate the value of design to hard-core engineeers to get them to devote more time and resources to design.

Design Deliverables - More than a prototype
I learned a lot how to set expectations for stakeholders, how to communicate the value of the design process, to make product roadmaps and timelines, and work with different personality styles along the way.

B2B: Integrate the product in clients' business

Integrate conversational AI into Client's ProductsWork closely with clients to define AI features that can translate and integrate into clinets' products.

Grow the Design Team and Foster Design CultureAfter series A funding, I got more support to hire another design intern and a UX researcher who can help with scaling conversational AI products. Working with a design intern meant that I needed to 1) be clear about what founders are expecting for design; 2) break down design goals into feasible roadmaps, timelines, deliverables and design tasks; 3) encouraging and fostering another junior designer. I had the chance to work with a wonderful design intern who was proactive and always eager to learn.

Scale the Design System to Provide Consistent ExperienceIn order to provide a consistent user experience when scaling the product, I've worked with external communications agency and an in-house content strategist to find the right message, design system, and content across platforms in products.

Scale the Product - Make Conversational AI Really PersonalHaving a really great conversational AI is far from enough because everyone has their own preferecnes, so the best solution is to provide a platform where people can create their own AI, and change it however they want. Similar but more powerful than API.AI, I worked on the platform along with a senior software enginner and a design intern to deliver experiences that were truly personal and tailored to each individual.

Product Life Cycle 4: Integration

B2C: Make the conversational AI robust to people

When the company signs multi-million production deals with world-leading banks, it becomes an important issue for us to make the product robust for users across platforms. And now is the right time to make the conversational AI product really focus on comsumers and direct world-leading banks how to integrate Conversational AI into their products.

Alexa User Research
When integrating financial conversational AI with Alexa, we want to know how will people react to it, what are they expecting, is the product a success, and are we really solving an urgent needs in the market?

Design Methods
Our design team of 4, a UX designer, a UX researcher, a Content Strategist, and a Senior Software Engineer started the study. Out of all design methods we decided to go with Diary Study, Surveys, and Interviews to learn as much as we can how do people adopt new technologies and what we're missing in our dogfooding process.

Design Challenges
We pay extraordinary attentions to details, such as email subject lines, email footers, privacy issues, PII (Personally identifiable information), and more. While there're still many challenges along the way, to name sone:

Privacy and Data Scrubbing: To protect users' privacy, the senior engineer in our team built the data scrubbing feature within a week so the study could continue.

Organizational Communication Issue: How to present the study and get approval from leadership team.

Team Issue: We lost our UX researcher during the study, how the rest 3 members take over the project?
When to argue for users, and when to compromise and push projects forward.

Not Enough Participants: There's not enough users, how to nudget people to actually use the product and fill out diary entry?

Next Step: Product Maturity
Although Finie has been really successful in getting deals from world-leading banks and Clinc have a great team, the next challenge for us is to really put the product in consumers' hands and make the product mature.

Takeaways
I've had the privilege of working with the best team and had them show me, challenge me, change me, and teach me. Here're some of many things I've learnt at Clinc.

What looks like talents is actually the result of brute force.
Whenever we have challenges that look like impossible or super hard to fix, always choose to try harder, try longer, and try every possible solution, and we may likely to come across one or more good solutions.

Good design is obvious.
When there're argument that's hard to reconcile about design, it always indicate the design is not good enough to people.

If I don’t want design to be treated as visual design, I need to sit in the meeting and have an opinion about what problems are worth solving and why.
I got requests from PMs and engineers at the last minute before actually product release that "You're a designer, can you make it pretty?". It's part of my job to educate people in the office what it takes to create good design, so I ask to sit in the meeting when people are making decisions and argue for problems that we should solve.